Main idea

Three well-filled columns do not amount to a direction. If the topics they carry were not chosen from what the company is trying to accomplish — grow, retain, expand into a segment, reduce support load, differentiate, secure a regulatory point, move upmarket — the roadmap merely presents more neatly the mess that already existed.

The improvement is real, and that is what misleads: the board is more legible, the meeting goes better, everyone finds their topic. The sorting worked on the form, not on the substance. The same topics, in the same disorder, have simply been given three labels.

A roadmap is therefore a consequence. It reads backwards: if you cannot trace each committed topic back to the objective it serves, what is missing is not the roadmap, it is the strategy.

Why it matters

It avoids a frequent piece of wasted work: redoing the roadmap when the problem sits upstream. A team that reformats its columns every quarter while the direction never changes is treating a symptom.

It also gives the order of operations. The question "what are we trying to accomplish?" comes before filling in, not during — once the cards are down, each of them always finds a retrospective justification.

Nuances and limits

A strategy can be implicit and shared without being written, especially in a small team. The roadmap is then tied to it without the link being visible, and demanding the document would waste time.

And the requirement can turn into paralysis: waiting for a perfectly formulated strategy before settling priorities amounts to settling nothing.

Open questions

• How explicit does a strategy have to be for two people to classify the same topic the same way?